Temporary reception locations for asylum seekers will soon also be opened in Delft and Roosendaal. It is the first time in ten years that asylum seekers have been received in both municipalities.
According to the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), Delft, Roosendaal and Westland were “until recently” the three municipalities that have had no asylum reception in the past ten years. Soon that will only be the municipality of Westland.
In Roosendaal, there are fifty asylum seekers who can be accommodated for a maximum of three months. The reception location has yet to be set up.
“We are doing this to relieve Ter Apel,” said a spokesperson for the municipality. “In addition, we have also been discussing long-term reception with COA for some time.”
Ter Apel application center regularly overcrowded
The lack of reception places has recently led to problems in Ter Apel, where refugees have to register for the asylum procedure.
Ter Apel has room for two thousand people, but there are regularly too few places to sleep. The cause is the poor flow in the asylum process. Due to the housing shortage, status holders are by no means always assigned a house and therefore continue to live in an asylum seekers’ centre. In addition, other municipalities in Ter Apel do not always want to come to the rescue when the shelter there is full.
Last week, dozens of asylum seekers threatened to sleep on a lawn in front of the COA application centre. At the last minute, the refugees were given a place in one of the offices on the site and they could spend the night on chairs.
The COA is in talks with several municipalities to establish an additional registration centre, but it will not say with which places.
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